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Why We Should Fear A Cashless World (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Dominic Frisby writes with a very interesting, albeit heavily opinionated, article from The Guardian discussing why we should all fear a cashless world. He argues "it will hand yet more power to the financial sector in that banks and related fintech companies will oversee all transactions." Every payment you will make will be traceable. While inequality is already a problem, it may be exacerbated even further in a cashless society. Frisby writes, "Cash, on the other hand, empowers its users. It enables them to buy and sell, and store their wealth, without being dependent on anyone else. They can stay outside the financial system, if so desired."
I guess it's going to be back to Barter World...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
You know, actually anonymous instead of pseudo-not-really anonymous.
Design suggestions?
Pointers to existing "bitcoin 2.0 the actually anonymous version" projects?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If you give government a power, it will use it -- for its own purposes. Government is a business that makes money for its employees by inventing new ways to control you. Sure, it sounds like guy who lives in a van down by the river talk. The media and the $200k per year professors disagree. But history is clear on this: government serves itself, in the name of your best interests. Be cautious :)
Cashless society means that Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx can impose sales tax on everyone in form of transaction fees.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/sta...
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Slashdot's "Digital" category was actually created for stories related to the Digital Equipment Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation hence the icon.
Maybe the category needs to be retired, or given the number of stories that have erroneously had it applied to them, maybe the icon need to be changed.
Carefully consider the trade offs is more accurate.
As with most changed they are new problems that needs to be minimized and benefits to take advantage of.
Stories love to use fear. Real life is more boring and more able to plan and control.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Cash is worthless paper with numbers printed on it. While not as traceable as cashless transactions, cash itself is not wealth. I've got a $100,000,000,000,000 Trillion Zimbabwe note to prove it.
Using paper money, backed by nothing, certainly requires a financial system.
Sure let me just shave off a percent of my gold coin to pay you...
Who you gonna get to issue those certified gold content coins?
Why would you use the DEC logo for this ...
The only solution is to get rid of money all togheter, but people are to ignorant to see the truth, and some others are not ready to lose the power that money gives them over other people, we are in the age where we have all the tecnologies to produce everything, for everybody.
I'm personally really ashamed and sadden that we as human beings are valued for how much money we can produce instead of what we really value.
I hope one day we'll live in a star trek-like society, where money is just obsolete, you laugh at people like me, anarchist-leftist-utopians-black blocks-however you bourgeois citizens call people like me because I think different, but I laugh at you because you are all the same, power-hungry egoists that live this earth to make money instead of living, period.
You know that cash value changes over time. Its value does not depend on gold reserves anymore. In the case of a zombie apocalypse or stock market crash, cash paper might become as valuable as toilet paper. Do you remember this African country, Zimbabwe? Its paper money became useless, so useless they had trillion dollar bills printed. So it is not a good idea to keep cash forever.
You don't need that. Which was why gold was popular.
Testing the purity of gold coins was relatively simple chemistry.
Check the density first, then dip it in acid.
Operation Choke Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is an illustration of what can happen. Porn actors, gun auctioneers, and other people that the government didn't like, suddenly found themselves denied bank accounts. The government's flimsy excuse was that these *MIGHT* be doing something illegal. This is on par with the IRS going after conservative non-profits.
At least for now, people can still put cash under their matresses. Even so, the police often seize cash from individuals carrrying large amounts. But imagine what happens when there is no cash option. You can't get paid because you have nowhere to deposit your "money".
Just because you're not a porn actor, or gun auctioneer, doesn't mean you're safe. "First they came for the porn actors, but I wasn't a porn actor... etc". Be very, very afraid.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I'm cynical... if we go to a cashless society, it will wind up being a society like a caste system or a royal/peasant system, similar to Saudi Arabia where a prince can have someone picked off the street and drawn/quartered at will.
Back in the Middle Ages, cash was an equalizer. A gold coin from a peasant was worth just as much as one handed from the Pope or the reigning King. Without this, it is quite likely we will fall back to this type of system, perhaps using DNA testing to check how pure-blooded someone is to see if they get a round of steak and lobster, or if they get to starve that night.
You HAVE to have a resource distribution system. There is only so many resources to go around, and Malthus is something that can be delayed, but never denied. So, pick your way to see who eats and who doesn't. Money is one way. Status in the Party is another. Rank and land titles is another way. There is one widget, and two people who want/need it. Pick the method to see who gets it and who doesn't. Communism has failed. Capitalism has failed as well.
Choose wisely.
I don't know any transsexual hookers who take bitcoin.
You are welcome on my lawn.
wow so you are suggesting that for the next century we test for density and purity with acid test on every single transaction with something pretty expensive and very hard to count small unit? I will stick with bitcoin I think...
Isn't cash similarly not-really anonymous though? Each bank note has a unique serial number on it which could easily be scanned and recorded with modern technology making transactions pseudo-anonymous if businesses were required to scan the notes for each transaction and banks record the notes you withdraw etc. Of course that would not cover everything but it would probably cover enough that authorities could use it to track people in. This makes it similar to bitcoin in that tracking the currency takes some effort but is not impossible.
Transaction fees from the card holders and government. Everything will be automatic bill pay. After your average consumption has been calculated automatic purchases will follow.(food,fuel,clothing and,housing) Service fees,assessed for anything imaginable.Economic adjustment charges. Instantaneous inflation adjustments.(none will be in your favor) Just enough left for your entertainment and relaxation.(partying and drugs)
When we have a cashless society we have slavery. Anyone who has deposited an out of town check has already discovered that you don't have the money right away. Oh, the bank where you deposited it has it that night. But you can't have it for up to 10 working days. This is called the "float". Banks "float" huge sums of money daily - your money - and lend it back to you and others at exorbitant interest rates. The banks, of course, keep those (up to 29% annually of the amount borrowed) interest collections. You can already, in the USA, transfer money only 10 times per month in the USA - even between your own accounts at the same bank. So already, you don't own your money and can't do with it what you please. You earned it. You've already paid taxes on your earning, but you still don't actually own what's left to do with as you please. You have restrictions on how much you can draw at a time etc. etc. Your money can be confiscated, blocked from usage and be divided by 1,000 overnight. Just ask anyone who lives in Argentina. You can literally go to bed a wealthy person, having worked fervently and saved your whole life, and wake up in the morning where every $100 you had in the bank is now only 10 cents. When your money is *completely* controlled electronically you are at the mercy of your government and the banks. Totally. You are effectively a hostage, if not a slave. I know, I've lived it already.
The one nice thing about the 'cashless economy' is that(unlike a great many awful ideas) both its backers and its detractors actually largely agree on the reasons for why it will be awesome/awful; they just phrase them slightly differently. More commonly you have to deal with one or both sides fundamentally disagreeing on what the effects of the plan will be, which requires you to sort out the fact of the matter, rather than just disagreeing on whether the effects are good or not.
The enthusiasts say "Hooray, saving the un-banked from their precarious existence and enabling access to financial services!" The detractors say "feeding the last holdouts and previously inaccessible markets into the maw of the financial service industry." They aren't actually disagreeing. The enthusiasts talk about the glorious transparency and ability to crack down on bribery, embezzlement, slush funds, and various similar things. The pessimists note the relentless and inescapable scrutiny and the ability to crack down on basically any flavor of transaction you don't much approve of. Again, not really a dispute over what the plan will do. Optimists extol the ease and convenience of frictionless electronic transacting without tedious stacks of paper. The less sanguine note that that's pretty much exactly what team Behavioral Econ says is the recipe to maximize impulse spending and consumer debt accumulation.
None of this is news to me. None of it is a surprise. I've seen the writing on the wall since the late 90's. All I want to know is why the category icon for this article is a proportionally mangled copy of the old D.E.C. logo?
Which is worse? Insignificant transaction fee, government / corporate controlled inflation or your time to melt and grade precious metal coins?
Any given system over time is only going to be reconfigured over time to favor those with power. By those with power. In capitalism, power being money.
This drift may be too subtle to notice, but it's obvious if you ponder the effect's foundation, not the effect's subtlety.
I'm not trying to be moralistic, even the benefactors may be unaware in cases where it's just a natural consequence of the imbalance.
This same line of reasoning identifies that giving more/all control to the financial services (banks) will see drift from the lopsided influence, the only debatable point being how much.
Once money becomes an imaginary concept, we'll finally find out what happens in a post-scarcity economy. Money becomes electrons. Money stops having any denomination besides "watt-hours." Energy becomes currency.
The fundamental problem is the "scourge" of crime.
Unfortunately, we're in a state of Industrial level crime: from cartels, to terrorism, to state sponsored shenanigans.
Most of these cash free laws aim at abetting crime. Cashless laws are supposed to stifle money laundering, ransoms, drug payments, gun payments, etc.
Anonymous transactions enable criminal transactions.
But free societies need to allow for crime, especially low grade crime. Nobody wants cartels, or terrorist groups, or even state sponsored shenanigans. But I do want to be able to pay people under the table for painting my fence. Or buying some weed on the street corner. Or buying a stolen stereo from the back of somebodies van.
With the pervasive surveillance society, we can't prevent crime, but we can post-mortem hunt down the perpetrators. We can run the tape back. Watch the guy with the knife walk backwards out of the convenience store in to his car. The car drive backwards down the street. The broken window suddenly reassembling itself as the guy pulls the hammer out of it and walks backward to the back alley, where he rides his bicycle backwards to his house.
But, we've been solving petty crimes like that forever using classic detective work and simply relying on people being people, and criminals being stupid.
That pervasive surveillance that nailed this guy with a mouse click is so oppressive as to stifle the real creativity of society. The growth of society. The change of society.
Adding money transfer tracking just broadens the net.
Cartels and terrorism are social issues, not criminal issues. It's a different category of ill. But pervasive surveillance, is worse.
NIRP = Negative Interest Rates, a situation where a central bank tries to push interest rates below zero (instead of getting interest on your savings, you pay the bank to hold your cash). The theory is that THIS is the thing that will force consumers to spend their wealth, and yadda yadda, the economy starts growing and adding jobs (the reason for the 2% inflation target is similar, to make debt more attractive as one can pay it off in less valuable currency, and to institute a "use it or lose it" tax which doesn't need to be voted on by the legislature).
The PROBLEM is that if rates get too negative, then people will convert their wealth to cash. Large denomination bills enable that. That's why there has been a push on to eliminate the 100 dollar bill, under the guise of battling terrorists and criminals. The head of the European Central Bank has recently proposed eliminating the 500 Euro note for the same reason. A happy coincidence is that this makes it harder for people to convert their wealth to cash.
This won't be instituted all at once. This is how it is introduced, under a false casus belli.
A cashless society means you are a captive audience to these sorts of experiments. Additionally, while cash doesn't require infrastructure to complete transactions, cashless transactions require a great deal of infrastructure. Buying something electronically means you are requesting permission to buy - either via authentication or other constraints.
Humans have been using currency for thousands of years. Instead of hastily rushing to do away with it, we should approach the situation with a lot of caution. Something proponents most certainly do not want.
Currency is already a logical construct. The slips of paper are inherently worth very little. They don't even function that well as toilet paper (not that I would know). Currency which becomes an electronic logical construct gives a tremendous amount of power to the people running the servers. And even more importantly perhaps, their cronies.
Found the gold bug!
Remind me again, was it the Illuminati or the Lizard Men who took us off the Gold Standard?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The thing that would worry me about a switch back to gold would be constraining the amount of money in the economy to the amount of gold in circulation. I think that would turn gold into a really really expensive form of currency. Like an ounce would have to be worth millions, or at least much more than it is worth currently.
Here it comes mutherphukers....the Mark of the Beast
And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Revelation 13:15-17
Web pages will take forever to load, not to mention my memory latency will shoot through the roof!
I'm more concerned about buying stuff when the power is out. Cash still works fine with that (not sure about the cash registers...). Extended power outages still happen.
Plus there's Operation Choke Point. There was something similar around 2004 or 2005 but I can't remember the name. The government has already sized accounts of people or companies it didn't like but who hadn't committed any crimes, they have shown themselves untrustworthy. What the government likes or doesn't like changes on a whim.
Mooooo! Moooooo! Cash is for COWS! Moooo! you Cashless COWS!!!
Note: I am not the cow troll but I have greatly missed the cow troll and so I Moooo in his honor. :-)
Because I will no longer be able to supplement my income by picking up pennies dropped on the pavement.
Easier to control. If you don't have hard currency, gold, precious metals in your hand, you would be a slave to the banks, who are slaves to the government. A cashless world, means the GOVERNMENT controls any money you have, not you. They can say, you want to buy xxxx? Card denied. It's not good for you. Healthcare comes to mind. Since the government has your health records, if you are overweight, diabetic and you stop at a place that sells sweets, you swipe your card and they say NO. You like to ski, you've had a couple accidents while doing that activity. You try to get a ski lift ticket, NO, you are denied again. Government/banks need money, no problem just take a few thousand from every person's account. And on and on. "oh you are just an alarmist"...they would never do that. WANNA BET!
This article is very US Centric and ignores many facts and counterpoints, one of which is Canada, which is already a cashless society for all intents and purposes (were down to only 44% of transactions using cash and it falls by roughly 10% a year). Furthermore it makes the assumption that a cashless society incurs costs on the poor, when that is only true in the USA where undertaking of the poor is an epidemic and Visa and Mastercard have a vice grip on the debit card industry, charging high fees for merchants and consumers. Thesent are US specific problems, not problems with cashless societies in general.
Like an ounce would have to be worth millions, or at least much more than it is worth currently.
Yes. That would suck for everyone building, buying, selling or using electronic devices and every other industrial and commercial use of gold.
Oh wait, that is everyone. Thank god we are not using a gold economy.
Payroll robberies" were a thriving industry when I started my working life in the 70's, electronic transfers have eliminated that risk and reduced insurance premiums, so good luck finding an employer who pays your wage in cash rather than direct deposit into your bank account.
James Cagney's "White Heat" begins with a train robbery of all things and ends in a botched payroll robbery. Even in 1949, Cody Jarrett was an anachronism, a dead man walking.
Reality check. You believe that paying with a credit card does not cost more than cash? You may not see the cost as it may be charged to the store instead of you, but you pay in higher prices for all goods and services. In fact you not only pay higher costs for all goods and services because of a card, you pay for the theft on all of those insured cards.
If the banks did not make money from cards do you think you would get them for free? How do you think they make money on those cards without collecting service fees that you pay for? Those are rhetorical questions, don't continue to prove PT Barnum correct.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Economics is fantasy, already. What's the difference?
The only good thing about money (cash or not) is that it exposes the poeple who believe the lie (people who have tons of it).
10 days, try depositing a check in the US that is from Canada, it took 30 days to get the cash in the account.
Hell, Paypal was faster.
"Slavery"?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
They've got a "system" alright.. Shame it only benefits a select few.
Using paper money, backed by nothing, certainly requires a financial system.
The gold bar at Fort Knox weighs about thirty pounds. Even in more manageable form, coin or bullion isn't practical for anything but the simplest of transactions. You need vaults, you need guards and armored couriers. You need standards of weight and measure.
You need stability --- which means at the very least that someone has to regulate the amount of gold in circulation.
The 1869 Black Friday financial panic in the United States was caused by the efforts of Jay Gould and James Fisk to corner the gold market on the New York Gold Exchange. It was one of several scandals that rocked the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. When the government gold hit the market, the premium plummeted within minutes and many investors were ruined. Fisk and Gould escaped significant financial harm.
Cornering The Market
The trouble is...
* Who is going to buy a $500,000 house with cash - who is going to be stupid enough to hide that kind of money under the mattress?
* Transporting large sums of cash around is great for criminals.
* Physical money isn't secure - applying ink to paper is something that is going to get increasingly easy as technology improves and stamping out disks of metal isn't happening because it's hard to do it cheaply enough to profitably with =$1 coins.
* Physical money is still backed by someone - it only works so long as there is widespread confidence in the stuff.
OK...so maybe gold...
* Who will actually want gold when the zombie apocalypse happens?
* The value of gold versus the things you need (food/water/power/shelter) is horribly variable.
* For most informal/low-quantity transactions, it's too easy to fake.
OK...so maybe something people actually need?
* You can't "save" most kinds of food.
* Water is bulky and heavy to exchange.
* Power can't be transported in ANY convenient manner.
* Shelter can't be traded in small quantities.
OK...so how about the "barter" system?
* Fine, so you have the ability to write a bunch of custom software, the farmer who has the food doesn't need custom software. You'd have to put together a chain of 20 to 30 people who want to barter simultaneously just to buy a loaf of bread.
All of this means that we need something that's very much like money - and it needs to be more abstract than physical coins and notes. If it's abstract then we have to trust the people who issue it and look after it. Those people don't work for nothing - so we end up needing to pay them in some manner. WIth bitcoin, for example, the miners administer the system - and we "pay" them by allowing them to increase the money supply - which in a large economy would mean that a gradual increase in money supply would increase inflation and result in us paying them in the decreasing value of our savings.
A *modest* credit card fee wouldn't be such a terrible thing - but all the time we fall for "Airline miles", "Cash-back" and crap-knows-what schemes that come along with them - we aren't getting a lower rate. If everyone picked their credit card strictly according to the lowest interest rate - then they'd be forced to compete on that criterion alone - and the rates would come down.
www.sjbaker.org
You WILL embrace it. For it is written, for it is done. You can toss all the hunnerd dolla bills at your monitor all you want. Amazon won't send you shit.
Platinum
It has more uses than gold, especially in chemical reactions..
Cashless society make several crimes no longer feasible, provided it is done with traceable transactions, not anonymous ones like bit coin. Bank robbery? A little silly if it involves transferring credits from the banks account to the criminal's account, doesn't it?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Banks compete with each other and have to please me to keep my business. The real danger is the government. It already forces banks to snitch on customers, will gleefully confiscate "suspiciously large" amounts of cash, and are already talking about eliminating large bills to further discourage you from using cash.
While folks are up in arms about the FBI, the real threat to privacy is the taxman... Can never buy yourself enough civilization, can you?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
For years /. and many other sites people kept extolling the virtues of a cashless society. Even now if you read all of the comments.
So many comments and so few mentions of the mark of the beast?
What people value in money is the ability to spend it as they wish. A cashless economy removes this freedom. This will drive people to seek other means of trade. Expect barter, silver, gold, bit-coin, soup cans, laundry detergent bottles, whatever.
I heard some people discuss alternative currencies on late night talk radio not too long ago and the expert they had brought up several means to bypass reserve notes and coins. The topic was not on a cashless society exactly but more generally about the value we place in government issued money.
One thing mentioned in this talk show was the potential use of currency from another country. There are laws already existing in the USA protecting the right of people to keep foreign bank notes. For a cashless society to work then laws like this would have to be repealed to prevent people from just using Euros or whatever, not that it'd prevent it completely but it would drive it underground.
As mentioned in the article there's just too many transactions where electronic transfers just aren't suitable. There's a lot of charities and such that live on small cash transactions, we even have a name for them, "a penny drive".
Oh, and the biblical reference to a mark of the beast will cause a problem with a lot of people.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This isn't a theoretical, academic problem. In 2013, the Cyprus government made a shock announcement, stating that they would be taking a "one-off" 'bailout levy' of 10% from any accounts over a certain balance value. Article on BBC News here:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl... This was proposed because Cyprus, like Greece, had a failing economy and owed the European Central Bank some $13 Billion as part of a loan repayment. The economy was tanking, the government didn't have the tax revenue, so they decided to go after the savers. The really wealthy in Greece kept their money off-shore and were not hit, but ex-pats from other EU nations could have been hammered if this went through. The interesting thing was that before the proposal was announced the Cypriot government put rules in place to prohibit people withdrawing their cash [since that would have started a run on the banks]. We should not underestimate the danger of this proposal.
My view of a cashless world is not that of what the banks would ever be capable of liking; Eutopia never is an option and is a capatalists worst nightmare.
When I grew up and cashless was being tossed around, it would inspire freedom and thoughts of fanciful unicorns and rainbows. Instead we see cashless to not mean the Star Trek way, but that of what the governments and banks banks want instead to harvest data and to make spending at the counter happen as quick as hft.
Much profit for some and misery for most.
More importantly than vaults, armored cars, etc, you need someone who understands how to validate a gold coin.
A single lead slug plated with gold would basically cause the vendor receiving it to validate the currency in every transaction. The paper bills we use today are much harder to counterfeit than a gold coin, and are more obviously detected than a home-minted coin might be.
A cashless world makes bribes much harder, drug dealing much harder, and the billions of dollars evading child support much more likely to actually go to child support.
When laws get in the way we should be fixing the laws, but cash is mostly about avoiding the laws, which means having cash generally punishes people who follow the law. Avoiding being tracked for privacy reasons is probably less than one millionth of the cash spent in the country.
Cash works then the network / Pay Station / is down.
One day I was trying to get gas and when to a few stations just to hear the our system is down / our system for X card is down. Also what about times where the stores internet is down and they don't have dial up CC readers?
How many payment systems are setup for store and send later other then places that can fall back to Manual Credit Card Processing.
stored value cards have issues with cloning and most metro systems are moving off of them.
There is no need to charge a direct service fee for credit card purchases. In the US, businesses and banks hid this long ago so the fees behave much like a tax. Store estimates 200 card transactions/week and the bank charges the business 2.00 per. So the cost of everything gets elevated to cover the 400.00 that is going to the bank.
That it is not called out as a separate line item on the customers bill does not mean that the bank is not making money on every transaction and that _everyone_ is paying additional fees to cover the difference. We are also paying for fraud on those same types of transactions, but they hide those costs too. Marketing people are not stupid, and if people saw these fees and how much fraud they paid to cover they would potentially not use the cards.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Even cash has issues with cloning.
Otherwise I agree that when the systems are down you might be able to pay with cash, however many shops here in Sweden can't even take cash when the systems are down since every transaction has to be securely logged and then sent to the tax authorities. The cash registers used have to be approved by the tax authorities as well.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
*shrug*
What about the time I went to the gas station after it closed - a much more common occurrence in most places than their business's internet being down. I could wait around until morning to pay some slow teller cash, or I can whip out my credit card and continue on my way.
Credit isn't the answer to everything, but in many places it's not the janky dial up, down half the time system it was in the 80s and maybe even the 90s, and is often faster than cash for payment.
With cash I can store my wealth without being dependent on anyone else. At least until some "central bank" or whatever discovers they can take the wealth away using inflation, without having physical access to my safe.
First of all just go to any internet store, try buying from foreing shop... lots of them just tout xyzed visa, free gift etc bs, and fail to mentition shipping becouse for domestic purchasers its free, then the shipping cost is hidden till you fill all forms... yeah great that much for easy comparison clearly they don't want my money :D
then regular shops dont run often models to toy with so theyre like acting warehouses? wtf seriously and then they blame how internet is stealing their customers....
First get those fucking models on display&physical toying access secondly buying from elsewhere than china/hongkong is so painful. hose guys just ship free with airmail = lol, so cashless yes maybe someday in china... in usa/eu not a chance our companies cant even tag prices clearly and where they do deliver
Quick, somebody teach all the hole in the wall cash only restaurants we know and love to use ring signature based alternative cryptocurrencies. /s
Staying outside of the financial system has no actual benefit. Your sock drawer or mattress can't get interest. Even the 1% use financial institutions because if your money is not in the system, it's not working for you.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
This post should've had a tinfoil hat icon, tags i suggest adding are:
#Tinfoilhat #magnets #ruawizard
or possibly #noideahowmoneyworks
=/
When I was a little kid in the 1950's we grew strawberries in out suburban yard in The San Fernando Valley. They were sweet, rich in flavor, were a deep red with no white zone around the stalk, and were soft and almost squishy, and you could smell them a mile away.
Today you buy a strawberry in a supermarket, even the local farmers market, and there almost no strawberry flavor. The color is the deep purple red that penetrates and bleeds very cell. It is a genteel civilized red that matches the red on a chart.
But, it is firm, almost like celery or an apple, and it will stand up to being picked months in advance, stored, bounced around on 700 mile delivery routes. Try that with the old strawberry and you will quickly end up with mush.
In the 1970's The LA Times ran an editorial about a strain of tomato. It was either the M-40 or M-40. Line. They had no flavor, no juice, but by golly you could drop it 10 feet and wouldn't bruise. You could use a chute like a cement mixer to load trucks with them in bulk without having to pack them individually.
Meanwhile, Congress had just backed off from automobile bumper standards, moving the hoped for no-damage speed from 5 mph to 2.5 MPH. The Times drolly noted that we now have tomatos that are more crash worthy than cars.
And that is what capitalism does. And they will do it somehow someway, to cash.
You would NEED an account that has that option. And many banks in the USA demand a payment for their services if you are poor. If you're rich, they'll give you money to "store" it there, must be that "trickle down economics" they keep banging on about at work, eh? So the poor will be charged more AND WILL HAVE NO CHOICE but to use their services.
Of course, the wealthy and big employees will still have ways to avoid tracked payments so they can pay illegals to do work cheaper than the unemployed,obviously trickling down has to avoid the middle and lower classes, when it does occur.
And if banks decide to charge more, they will be able to charge whatever the hell they want, tiered anyway they want.
Because you will have no choice but to use their services.
This idea was part of the plot of Margaret Atwood's excellent The Handmaid's Tale.
The story is about a post war world in which fertility has plummeted due to the use of chemical weapons (I think), and the US is now run by an ultra-conservative christian authoritarian government (think a Christian version of Saudi Arabia), and the limited number of fertile women are essentially "breeders" (the Handmaids of the title), slaves who bare children for the ruling elite. It's a fantastic dystopian novel.
The authoritarian regime that controls the US in the story did away with cash. Then at a later point they simply suspended women's access to any kind of payment system. Without recourse to cash they were utterly powerless. I've always felt The Handmades Tale was a far scarier book than 1984 (which is also great), because it seemed much more plausible, especially as such societies essentially already exist.
Unlike some of her other books, The Handmaid's Tale is a short and quick read, well worth an evening or two.
Paul Leader
If they refuse cash as payment of the debt, THEY HAVE RESCINDEND THE DEBT. This means YOU WALK OUT WITH THE GOODS. It's yours. They didn't want the legal tender, you are free of debt. You're right that you're not forced to accept legal tender. But that means refusing to put a debt on the one offering.
So walk out with the goods.
You're free to do so.
If they call the cops, in front of the cops, offer the cash, it gets refused, you get to walk off with the goods again, and the shop owner gets to tell the police why the hell they wasted police time.
Seems like you moved the criminality and losses elsewhere.
And since the fraud can remain undetected until afterward, and requires no obvious track to the culprit (e.g. phone sales), wheras if you wanted to steal physical cash, it was
a) necessary to be there in person
b) necessary to identify as the one demanding the cash
c) had to be obviously known to be illegal, no possible "plausible deniability"
so all you did was make it HARDER to prosecute.
Not to mention easier to pull off. A weedy little runt can pull off a card scam, by the thousands, each day, but cannot get away with a smash and grab at a supermarket for the physical cash.
So tell me how much better things are now we removed cash again?
it HAS to be free to use for everyone. After all, if wasn't needed until you mandated it, so therefore it's artificial and you need to ensure that it undercuts nobody forced to obey.
For being under the jurisdiction of the cops and courts, you get your say in the justice system, because you have no choice to decline.
For being under the jurisdiction of the banks, what do you get for your lack of choice to decline?
This is war by the government on money laundering. It's part of the larger War on Some Drugs, which has damaged areas from foreign policy to local policing, to, well, just about every political issue/area. Don't look for any sense in either of these wars, there isn't any. Obama recently said of the iPhone case that if phones are uncrackable, everyone could have a Swiss Bank Account in their pocket. And he said it like it was a bad thing!
I just ignore whatever the poster says, and every second level responder, since it's liable to be the same moron posting replies to the replies of their post.
So thanks for making blocking out morons easier on slashdot.
I do wonder why you make your posts so pointless to read, yet still put the effort into typing them out...
once again ... your story only holds in the USA ...
30 years ago in NZ I received my first pay cheque issued through Bank BCD, and I promptly took it to Bank WXY, opened a new account, whereupon they IMMEDIATELY handed me my new ATM card, which I promptly took to Bank FGH and used their ATM to extract my money. All instantly cleared and verified.
You murricans are so fucking backwards ... ... 10 days ... hahahahahahaha !!!!!
It's been claimed the minute cash is made illegal the bank will give you a negative interest rate on your account.
Maybe , maybe not, but one thing is clear: it does mean another shift in power, and it's not a shift in our favor.
The US has been spending *billions* to continue to mint sub-worthless pennies because we can't stand to part with them. We continue to print $1 paper bills LONG after it's been successfully proved by other Western commercial societies that 1-unit, 2-unit, and even 5-unit coins make far more sense.
Do you seriously think we're going to "get rid of cash" generally (for sensible or malignant reasons, take your pick) when we're the currency-equivalent of irrational hoarders?
-Styopa
It's not like the government would ever make it illegal to own water, don't think about it too much. It already passed us, and soon we will be up to our necks in contamination. Dune, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not even counting the DCL/inflation they already have, just slightly less of a fine to use a bank. But what about the fee's then, ..........
"Using paper money, backed by nothing"
Actually fiat money it is backed by labor.
You can have all the gold in the world but if no labor would be done there'd be nothing to buy with that gold, and you can't eat it, wear it, nor live in it - and that gold would be useless.
Also it would be a striking coincidence if the value of the total amount of gold in the world (at any point in time) would be equal to the total value of the global economy (at any point in time). Not to mention that the value of gold varies greatly.
This reminds me of what my mother (an otherwise sweet and kind woman) used to say, every time the conversation turned to the greedy people at the top:
"Lock them all in one room with ONE KNIFE."
The point being that their greed and lust for power will cause them to constantly fight over that one KNIFE till there is only one of them left. And hopefully he will die from his injuries.
Agree 100%. In a cashless society, money will just be used as another way to surveil people's lives and profile them. It's already pretty bad, if I for instance went 100% cash transactions for everything (which is still technically possible) I'd be flagged as a potential criminal/terrorist because they can't 'see' what I'm doing with my money -- and that is completely and totally wrong.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Paper money actually has a lot of shortcoming for the users - theft, forgery, arbitrary inflation. Even if cash was solving privacy problems effectively, it can not be used to buy anything online. Since you have to show up for every transaction, your risks of getting photographed, detained or simply mugged are much higher than when money is exchanged over Internet.
We should be embracing technology and using it to solve privacy and stable value problems rather than going luddite. Bitcoin is only the first attempt at cryptocurrency and we can learn from its problems to develop something robust enough for mainstream use.
You missed one major difference between the two and it's very very important: Business operates via voluntary transactions. Government operates by diktat and force
That affects both how they operate as well as the outcomes they produce.
He's inclined to beat immigrants, Muslims, and Mexicans, too.
But not to worry. He is the perfect assurance we're going to have a Democrat in the white house this next time around. He's doing a wonderful job of divorcing the low-functioning and cognitively crippled from the traditional Republican voting block; no actual sane conservative who has looked even moderately closely at his rhetoric and history would vote for him. The Democrats, in contrast, will have the usual platitude-spouter, having rejected Bernie, plus will by and large look at Trump as the insane reality-show caricature he actually is and will handily swamp the damaged Republican brand in "oh no you don't" votes. Thinking swing voters likewise.
I'm hugely looking forward to watching all this come down. Hilarious to watch the garbage the Republicans a have been spewing for years at the Fox News demographic come back and bite a huge chunk out of their collective buttocks.
Trump has never met a stupid remark that can't get out of his mouth. What a clown.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"Why We Should Fear A Cashless World"
If you have to have this explained to you, you're probably too dumb to understand it.
Yes, it's all about anonymity and autonomy. Every government's wet-dream is to be able to track every transaction no matter how small.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
...without electricity. Having experienced one-week blackouts in a major cities after hurricanes and ice-storms, I can tell you that without cash you are royally screwed. Even the recent 2 day blackout in San Diego, California was enough to leave some people very hungry who could not buy food without cash. I was eating steak and using my stored gasoline to drive anywhere I wanted to go on empty streets.
What are we Rome before a collapse?
Yeah and the left HATES empowered people so we'll probably all see cashless societies in Europe and North America.
You do remember when eastern US power went down ? ATM machines, Cable TV, internet and credit cards did not work. I used to keep an extra $300 around just in case. Then I got married again.That pretty much fouls up that back up plan.
Last time I flew, the airline only accepted credit cards.
Anyone who has deposited an out of town check
A check? what is this 1990?
I still have my last cheque (that's how we spell it here) book here, and the last cheque I used was in the 90's.
i guess that sucks then.
if things get messy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
LOL! That ship sailed a long time ago. Have you ever tried to do that? Talk to one of your poorer friends that has no credit, and they will tell you how easy it is. Sure there is a bit of a grey market using cash for certain jobs and people, folks in the service industry and not claiming tips, and building contractors and the like accepting cash and having some creative accounting... but that is about it, and even they are not "outside" the financial system. Any large amount is very difficult to keep anywhere without being electronic. About the only example I can think of is if you invested just about everything into property, which would largely still be "paper" in that you would have deeds, are are physical things (or at least places) etc...
I'm not sure we will ever get away from cash, however even over the last decade or so, its use has dwindled, and likely that trend will continue until it is used only in a niche settings for say emergencies or something (remember travelers checks, does anyone still use those?)...
This is a great thread. I wanted to print it but all the formatting gets stripped out, including the discussion thread structure - all I'm getting is a very big and unpleasant wall of text.
Any ideas? Thanks.